hello again. this is day 2 of our trip in tokyo and we decided to start things off with breakfast from the local family mart. bought what we thought was apple juice but turned out to be really strong minging green tea but did play it safe with some yogurts and pastries.

first stop was a trip to the imperial palace. kinda messed up with the ticket on the metro line and tried to use it at the wrong barrier, slightly embarassing but it did make other tickets cheaper for that day hehe. there was a massive contrast between the gardens and the high rise financial buildings surrounding them. got to hear a bunch of men screaming at each other behind closed doors (think they were training for some sort of martial arts. it sounded painful). spent much of the time mooching through the hedges trying to get a look at the palace, but no luck. Then went off to try find the 2 bridges, apparently the only place in tokyo you can get a look at the palace, but we gave up on that as a load of joggers almost ran us down and it was too far!

Next stop for the day was shinjuku to go see the tokyo government metropolitan building were we met mizo the guide we accidently got stuck with for a tour round the building. he took us to see some bizarre artwork that even he didn't understand and tried to make us guess what they meant. they just ended up being a series of happy and sad emotions that pretty much all looked the same. when we mentioned that we were staying in asakusa he offered to take us out for dinner but by the time we came back from the toilets he had retracted his offer. we suspected that he had been on the phone to his wife during that time.

next stop was shibuya and the worlds busiest pedestrian crossing and the starbucks that featured in lost in translation. we had hot chocolates and they were very chocolatey whilst we waited for it to get dark to take pictures of the neon-clad buildings and came across a guy giving out free hugs which was nice. we declined but did take some photo's instead. by this time it getting cold and dark and were tired enough to go to bed to get up at 3am when it was snowing ready for our next flight.

our next blog will be from thailand. be in touch soon xxx